Category Archives: Collections

18th-Century Balloonomania!

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An exact representation of Mr Lunardi's New Balloon as it ascended with himself 13 May 1785

An exact representation of Mr Lunardi’s New Balloon as it ascended with himself 13 May 1785. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder describes the balloonomania that seized France and England in 1783 when competing impresarios ascended in the first hot-air balloons.  Beyond Holmes’ chapter, there is even more balloonomania to explore.

Today, Thomas Keymer examines the venerable Samuel Johnson’s interest in balloons and human flight throughout his career in a post for the Oxford University Press blog:

Initially, Johnson saw huge potential in balloons for advancing human knowledge, and subscribed to a scientifically motivated scheme for high-altitude flight, which, he wrote, would “bring down the state of regions yet unexplored.” He was fascinated by thoughts of the view from above, though he couldn’t imagine seeing “the earth a mile below me, without a stronger impression on my brain than I should like to feel.” But in time Johnson grew more sceptical about the value of balloons—fragile, combustible, impossible to direct—for either transportation or science, and disease preoccupied him instead: “I had rather now find a medicine that can ease an asthma.” He never makes the analogy explicit, but it’s clear from his last letters that, consciously or otherwise, he came to associate his bloated, dropsical body with a sinking balloon, and his difficulty in breathing with an aeronaut’s struggle to stay inflated. In a gloomy, earthbound message just weeks before death, he seems to glimpse the void in Montgolfier shape. “You see some ballons succeed and some miscarry, and a thousand strange and a thousand foolish things,” he tells the enviably youthful, mobile Francesco Sastres: “But I see nothing; I must make my letter from what I feel, and what I feel with so little delight, that I cannot love to talk of it.”  [Read Keymer’s complete post here. ]

Gilbert King recently described the life of Sophie Blanchard, the first female aeronaut of the balloon craze in a post for Smithsonian Magazine’s website.

You can explore the Smithsonian Museum’s array of ceramics, textiles, paintings, furniture, and other objects commemorating and capitalizing on the balloonomania by browsing the collection The Birth of the Balloon at the National Air and Space Museum website.

Paul Keen’s new book Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, (Cambridge University Press, 2012) includes a chapter on Balloonomania; you can read a brief extract of the chapter here.

Cognitive Science and the Humanities in 18th-Century Studies

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Characters and Caricatures: subscription ticket for 'Marriage à la Mode' (1743). William Hogarth

Characters and Caricatures: subscription ticket for ‘Marriage à la Mode’ (1743). William Hogarth. Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Chauncey B. Tinker, B.A. 1899

“This is your brain on Jane Austen…” declared the recent Stanford news description of the work of Natalie M. Phillips on fMRI brain images of graduate students reading Austen both attentively and in a more leisurely mode.  The story of this research collaboration among “neurobiological experts, radiologists and humanities scholars” was featured by news outlets around the world, indicating the broad appeal of research that applies the newer tools of cognitive neuroscience to humanities analysis.

Phillips’ work with cognitive scientists develops that of cognitive humanities scholars such as Alan Richardson, Jonathan Kramnick, Blakey Vermeule, and Lisa Zunshine.  These pioneers in the field of what some call “Cognitive Cultural Studies” ask how the new research on the brain should impact our analyses of cultural production in the eighteenth century.  Phillips augments this work by actually producing some of the new research on the brain.  While this collaboration between literary and scientific scholars seems exciting and new, in some ways it actually returns to the eighteenth-century model of discourse in which poetry and chemistry, music and astronomy mingled interactively (as Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder amply details).

The 18th-Century Common seeks contributions to a Collection on Cognitive Science and 18th-Century studies in which scholars engaged in this work–as well as those who critique it–will give readers tantalized by Natalie Phillips’ research on “your brain on Jane Austen” opportunities to learn more.

Meanwhile, here are some preliminary avenues of exploration:

The Afterlife of Mary Shelley (in New York City)

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Frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; engraving by Theodor M. von Holst. Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library.

In January, The Kitchen (self-described as a “non-profit, interdisciplinary organization that provides innovative artists working in the media, literary, and performing arts with exhibition and performance opportunities”) in New York City will unveil its exhibition, entitled “Radiohole:  Inflatable Frankenstein!”.  The exhibition will explore the “tumultuous and tragic life of Mary Shelley,” author of the (in)famous (and brilliant) novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) and wife of British Romantic author, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Shelleys have been the subject of numerous recent exhibitions in Manhattan.  The Kitchen’s provocative exploration of Shelley and her Frankenstein follows in the wake of the New York Public Library’s Shelley’s Ghost:  The Afterlife of a Poet, which investigated “the literary and cultural legacy” of the Shelleys and their Romantic-age circle of authors and fellow intellectuals this past February 24th-June 24th at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery.  Indeed, the literary and cultural reputation of the Shelleys is alive and well in New York.

18th-Century Feminism, Women’s Poetry, and an 18th-Century Library

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Portrait of a Lady, Unknown artist (18th century), British. Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Dr. Ruth Ivor.

This week the Tumblr for Eighteenth-Century Fiction highlights a fascinating list of articles from the journal’s archive on feminism in eighteenth-century literature and culture, with links to articles on Burney, Wollstonecraft, Defoe, and more.

Readers of The 18th-Century Common should also check out The Aphra Behn Society’s ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830.  ABO is an “online annual publication that serves as a forum for interactive scholarly discussion on all aspects of women in arts between 1640 and 1830, especially literature, visual arts, music, performance art, film criticism, and production arts. The journal features peer-reviewed articles encompassing subjects on a global range” and while it is “intended for scholars and students” we expect it will interest the nonacademic readers who frequent The 18th-Century Common.  We want especially to direct you to the first volume, Women’s Poetry.

The New York Society Library, founded in 1754 as a subscription library, recently cataloged a collection of late 18th- and early 19th-century books.  As their press release explains:

The New York Society Library has recently completed the online cataloging of its Hammond Collection:
1,152 novels, plays, poetry, and other works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally
part of a New England lending library, these volumes date from 1720 to 1847 (bulk dates 1770-1820)
and reflect the popular reading interests of those years, including Gothic novels, romances, epistolary
fiction, musical comedies, and other genres. A number of these books are quite scarce; in a few cases,
the NYSL holds the only known extant copy.

To browse these books as a group in the Library’s catalog: http://library.nysoclib.org/,
search by author for “James Hammond’s Circulating Library.”

While you’ll have to go to New York to actually read the books, we recommend browsing the catalog, wherever you are.

The University of Woodford Square and the Age of Obama

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Edward L. Mooney. “The Hero of Lake Erie.” 1839. Portrait in oils after John Wesley Jarvis (1839). U.S. Naval Academy Museum Collection.

The non-Western world was the “common” of 18th-century Europe, territory to be gradually colonized—fenced off, walled off, or hedged off—by powers looking to raise the value (and the rents) of their respective empires.  For modern nations forcibly melded and forged within this ruthless cauldron, imperial legacy offers a bitter, but seemingly indispensable path to identity.

In Port of Spain you will find—if lost—a cemetery gate ordained with the British Imperial Coat of Arms, iron corroding from the relentless force of West Indian rains, an eroding misnomer amidst the rising steel towers of the Caribbean’s most dynamic economy.  A freshly-placed bronze plaque, a recent gift to Trinidad & Tobago from the U.S. Embassy in honor of the country’s 50th anniversary of independence, denotes its significance.

Here an “illustrious hero and Christian gentleman”—U.S. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry—was once interred following a gracious ceremony by the British governor of Trinidad, Sir Ralph James Woodford.  The Commodore succumbed to yellow fever in 1819 on his 34th birthday, but not before becoming a well-known naval hero during America’s first international campaigns—the Barbary Wars and War of 1812.  (Commodore Oliver Perry is not to be mistaken with his younger brother, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, the catalyst for prying open Japan to the West in 1853 and the resulting Meiji Restoration.  Has a bloodline of American sea-farers ever had a greater impact on history?)

 

Roncevert Almond. “Perry Gateway at Lapeyrouse Cemetery in Port of Spain, Trinidad.” 2012.

Wandering the streets of Trinidad, I was struck that the true character of a modern nation is not found in the rusting cemetery of empire, but in the living commons—the intellectual and physical space animated by the human spirit.  Merely a half-kilometer away, but ages apart, is the birthplace of modern Trinidad & Tobago, Woodford Square.  Seated before the country’s Parliament, the Red House, and courts of justice, this public space serves as the beating heart of Port of Spain.

When Dr. Eric Eustace Williams, the nation’s founding father and first prime minister, applied his Oxford education to challenge the British imperial system in Trinidad & Tobago, he did so from Woodford Square.  Ever the history professor, Dr. Williams held a series of lectures at the “University of Woodford Square” (as the park became known) that provided the intellectual basis for national sovereignty.  Forewarning the struggle of constructing a post-colonial identity, Dr. Williams remarked:

There can be no Mother India, for those whose ancestors came from India.  There can be no Mother Africa, for those of African origin. There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties.  There can be no Mother China, even if one could agree as to which China is the Mother; and there can be no Mother Syria and no Mother Lebanon.  A nation, like an individual, can have only one Mother.  The only Mother we recognize is Mother Trinidad & Tobago, and Mother cannot discriminate between her children.  (History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 1962).

As a result of this political dialogue, Woodford Square was no longer the inert namesake of a former imperial overseer, but a reclaimed center of learning, a breathing manifestation of budding national identity.

Upon the lowering of the Union Jack and the tolling of the Anglican Cathedral’s bells, a new nation was born on August 31, 1962.  Addressing the new citizens via radio, the Prime Minister reminded his audience that “democracy means freedom of worship for all and the subordination of the right of any race to the overriding right of the human race.”  A contemporary of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Dr. Williams laid the pathway to a Rainbow Nation in the Americas.  The journey began long ago.

It was on behalf of the Spanish in 1498 that Columbus first spotted the three pinnacles of the Trinity Hills (hence “Trinidad”), but Madrid largely ignored the new colony due to its lack of gold or silver.  Lima and Bogota were more enticing jewels during the mercantile economy of the time.  Even Sir Walter Raleigh, in search of El Dorado, was disappointed by the lack of spoils and in 1592 sacked the lonely Spanish settlement.  In order to populate the island, the Spanish finally resorted in 1783 to issuing land grants to Roman Catholic Frenchmen fleeing pre-revolutionary turmoil at home.

Adam Smith’s industrializing Britain, however, envisioned for its possessions a more complex division of labor.  Following Spanish capitulation in 1797, British sugar barons and shipments of African slaves, cogs in the triangle trade of Europe-Africa-America, soon arrived.  Amerindian natives were already in steep decline—the exchange of cocoa production for soul salvation from the Catholic Church had resulted in a decidedly one-sided bargain.

In a unique and bemusing act of irony, in 1845 the British began “importing” indentured South Asians to the islands in order to fill the labor shortage at sugar plantations caused by earlier black emancipation.  They were supplemented by Chinese, Syrians, and Lebanese workers.  The artificial arrival of these “Oriental” exiles, equipped with their Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist upbringing, forced an early debate on multi-racial and multi-religious nation-building.

(Even its current political geography, as a member of the Caribbean states, is more historical accident than natural reality.  Trinidad is actually an extension of the Paria Peninsula, an outcrop of the South American continental shelf—as opposed to an independent island arc like the rest of the Lesser Antilles.  On a clear day one can spy Venezuela from the capital city; the distance between the countries is only seven miles.)

Consequently, via the formation of Trinidad & Tobago, the journey of Columbus was complete.  Europe did not arrive in Asia through the Americas.  Instead, the Orient, the tale of Azeri poets and Silk Road travelers, had arrived in the Americas through Europe.  On the pleasant banks of this Caribbean island, on the volcanic cliffs of this South American mountain, humankind advanced a peculiar experiment.  The West—Indies indeed!

Dr. Williams noted that with independence the people of Trinidad & Tobago faced the “fiercest test in their history—whether they can invest with flesh and blood the bare skeleton of their National Anthem, ‘Here, every creed and race find an equal place.’”  (History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 1962).  It is a work in progress, much like the United States.

At the conclusion of my project in Port of Spain, I ventured to Woodford Square and reflected upon the young Commodore, the end of empire, and the continuous journey of a nation.  The park remains a lively space for debate and learning.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, I came across the latest lesson offered at the University of Woodford Square—an observation on the meaning of “The Age of Obama” and the power of the “changing course of time.”  Given the influence of demography upon national identity, as made evident by the U.S. presidential election, it was a fitting stop on the way home.

Roncevert Almond. “University of Woodford Square.” 2012

“African” in Early Haiti, or How to Fight Stereotypes

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“The Slave Ship” or “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming on.” J.M.W. Turner, 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The concept of Africa as a unified region whose inhabitants share a common identity developed alongside the transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth century.  Europeans thought that the group of people they purchased and exploited (despite their vast cultural differences) belonged to a common group because of their social position.  This position was at first justified by theories of climate.  (They erroneously believed that people from “the torrid zone” could withstand hard labor in harsh climates better than those from more temperate zones.)  Gradually this inferior social position became known as that of “Africans,” which means that ancestry, geographic origin, and common physical traits became intertwined and began to define an entire group of people.  In this post, I examine, through the example of early Haiti (which was known as Saint-Domingue until 1804), the influence of a European understanding of Africa that erased nuances between different cultures.

When many twenty-first-century Americans hear the term “eighteenth century,” they might think of the beginning of the United States, the Enlightenment, or perhaps the French Revolution.  Artificial divisions between Western and non-Western histories mean that many of us learned a one-sided story about what happened in the Americas in the eighteenth century and do not often think of the many interactions between Europeans and people of other regions that happened during the time.  Sure, most of us know about the transatlantic slave trade, but we still do not often think of it as a period of contact that involved two active (albeit unequal) participants:  the slave master and the slave.  Henry Louis Gates describes what developed out of these interactions as a “veritable seething cauldron of cross-cultural contact” (4).  This “seething cauldron,” this place where cultures mixed violently, unequally, and even sometimes harmoniously, gave rise to the first successful slave revolt in the Americas.  The eighteenth century did not just end with the French Revolution, but rather with the birth of Haiti, the first black republic, and the first postcolony in the world.

Laurent Dubois, a well-respected historian of Haiti, has noted that the Haitian Revolution was an African revolution (5).  Indeed, two-thirds of the enslaved people living in Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century were born in Africa.  Beginning in the late 1780s, debates about the rights of three classes of people began in Paris:  the enslaved, the gens de couleur (free people, mainly of both European and African ancestry), and slave owners.  A lobby of slave owners known as the Club Massiac proved particularly unwilling to budge on rights for anyone with African ancestry in Saint-Domingue.  By 1791, the enslaved population took matters into their own hands and began to revolt.  Just two years later, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery, which was made official for all French colonies in Paris in 1794.  Napoleon’s troops, however, returned to Saint-Domingue in 1801 to reestablish slavery.  They were defeated at the Battle of Vertières in November of 1803, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758-1806) declared the independence of the nation of Haiti (from the Arawak name for the island) on January 1, 1804.

As early Haitians were carving out a position for themselves independent of one of the most powerful colonial empires of the time, they had to assert their equality as human beings and their unity as a nation.  This required a rather complicated philosophical and rhetorical manoeuver that is the subject of this post:  early Haitians had to claim that this identity known as “African”—a label that the French gave them—did not denote inferiority.  At the same time, they were not all one homogenous group known as “Africans.”

People arguing against extending the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) to people of African descent in the colonies used the term “African” to highlight that these people were foreign, different, not French and therefore excluded from access to rights.  In this moment, we can see that “African” began to take on a meaning that included anyone with non-European ancestry in the colonies (i.e., people whom French colonists wanted to omit from the new doctrines of freedom espoused by revolutionaries).

Early Haitians argued that they were equal to the French, despite the negative use of this term “African.”  Yet while “African” was a term that they sometimes championed as they were asserting their humanity, it did not achieve a sense of solidarity among the varied population of eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Haiti.  The eighteenth-century Creole colonist and writer M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry mentions the large number of different peoples represented among “the black population” of the colony.  In his work, distinctions between Africans in Saint-Domingue were glossed, detailed, and translated for those unfamiliar with the colony.  A new site developed by the French Atlantic History Group that contains advertisements for runaway slaves shows the diversity of people living in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue.  Slaves were described as belonging to the Nago, Congo, Senegalese, Gold Coast, Tiambo, and Arada “nations,” just to name a few (“nation” meant “group” in this context).  During the Haitian Revolution, these “nations” did not always fight together and division existed among different cultures (Jenson 620).  In addition to the diversity present among people born in Africa, slaves born in the colony (Creole) were often of a higher status than those who had survived the Middle Passage (Bossale).  The population also included people of both European and African ancestry (often the result of consensual and non-consensual relationships between masters and enslaved women).  These gens de couleur were often of a higher class and sometimes owned slaves themselves.

What it meant to be African or from Africa in Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century was complex and multifaceted, which means that in early Haiti vindicating the rights of a group of people based on their common African origin was not easy or even particularly effective.  If we examine some of the earliest writing by Haitians—their governmental documents—we see that in order to argue for Haitian national unity, the Declaration of Independence never refers to “Africa.”  “Africa” actually meant division and was counter to their vision of a new nation.  In a similar manner to Europeans, the authors (Jean-Jacques Dessalines with the aid of his secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre) left Africa out of discussions of identity, but not because they thought of Africans as a unified block.  It was precisely the opposite.  For them, being reminded of Africa might distract Haitians from the new national identity that they wished to form.  If anything, the unified block had to be comprised of Haitians—a new category that Dessalines would, in his 1805 constitution, define as “black.”  By associating “black” with nationality rather than with physical traits, Dessalines challenged a developing negative conception of “race” that the Europeans were creating.  Dessalines made “black” a political project of independence.

Studying the eighteenth century, and Haiti in particular, helps us see how the meaning of the term “African” developed within the context of the institution of slavery.  This institution classified its victims based on physical traits that were common to people from a vast region that originally had been categorized only by its climate.  In the Americas, it was what this population had in common—their unfortunate position as enslaved peoples—that defined them as a group; physical traits came to represent this position.  Slavery created racial difference.

It takes philosophical argumentation to combat stereotypes that deny our freedoms as individuals.  Early Haitians contributed to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought on freedom and human rights by challenging and redefining the categorizations set up for them by a hostile colonial ruler. They were some of the first postcolonial philosophers and provide us with a powerful example of how categorizations are ever-evolving ways of conceptualizing the world that should be considered critically and challenged accordingly.

 Works Cited

Dessalines, Jean‑Jacques.  Déclaration d’Indépendance, Centre historique des Archives nationales de Paris, AF III 210.

Dubois, Laurent.  Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution.  Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2004.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  The Signifying Monkey:  A Theory Of African-American Literary Criticism.  New York, NY:  Oxford UP, 2010.

Jenson, Deborah.  “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the African Character of the Haitian Revolution.”  The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3 (July 2012):  615-638.

Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E.  Description de la Partie française de l’Ile de Saint-Domingue.  Philadelphia, 1797.

“Le Marronnage à Saint-Domingue,” Accessed November, 2012 at http://marronnage.info/fr/index.html.

Happy (Recent) Birthday, Sir William Herschel!

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Sir William Herschel, detail of an oil painting by L. Abbott, 1785; in the National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London

November 15 was the birthday of composer and astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822).  As a musician who also discovered the planet Uranus, Herschel plays a starring role in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Knopf, 2009), a book that is one of our points of departure at The 18th-Century Common.  On November 15, 2012, the radio program Composers Datebook played Herschel’s Oboe Concerto in C; you can listen the program here.  A short biography of Herschel can be found here.  A collection of the papers of William Herschel, Caroline Herschel, and John F. W. Herschel are housed at the Royal Astronomical Society.   You can see a picture of the 20-foot telescope Herschel built here.  You can explore Herschel’s accounts of his astronomical findings at 18thConnect.org, where I’ve created an “Exhibit” of 4 texts.  Tristra Johnson examines the representation of gender in Holmes’ account of William Herschel and his sister Caroline Herschel for The 18th-Century Common here.

Guns and Austen

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The military contrast, print from 1773

The military contrast, print from 1773. Source: ECF Tumblr

Jacqueline Langille, Managing Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction, offers a weekly post on the ECF Tumblr that features a thematic collection of articles from the journal’s archives.  The links she posts take you to abstracts of the articles, and from there you can freely download the articles in full.  As many journals charge hefty fees both to institutions and individual subscribers, Eighteenth-Century Fiction must be commended for allowing open access to its articles.  If you are an enthusiast of eighteenth-century studies, you should follow the ECF Tumblr!  This week’s ECF Tumblr post features the entire Special Issue of the journal from 2006 on War/La Guerre, including an essay that is a recurring favorite of my students: Christopher Loar’s “How to Say Things With Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.”

Susan Celia Greenfield, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, has been writing a series of blog posts for the Huffington Post this fall called The Jane Austen Weekly.  She makes provocative and convincing connections between Jane Austen and contemporary events, demonstrating the continuing importance of the (long) eighteenth century, which is very much our goal at The 18th-Century Common as well.  This week she reminds us that we learn from Austen’s (in)famous narrative reticence to be suspicious of an unironic desire for narrative control such as we heard expressed repeatedly by both sides in the U.S. presidential campaign.

The Jane Austen Society of North America just released its Call for Papers for its Annual Meeting in Montreal in October 2014.  JASNA is famously open to academics and nonacademics alike, and as such is a real-life model for the kind of meeting of minds that we hope to achieve at The 18th-Century Common.  For all you know, we may even be administering The 18th-Century Common in Regency costumes…

The Age of Wonder and the Image of Genius

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Julia Margaret Cameron, “Sir John Herschel,” 1867. Albumen silver print from glass negative. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

What does genius look like? One place to start is the hair, to judge from photographs of Albert Einstein. The famous physicist was not the first to suggest that an unkempt mane is a sure sign of an active mind. When the Victorian Julia Margaret Cameron produced this portrait of John Herschel in 1867, she had waited three years “to take this noble head of my great master,” and she was not going to miss her chance to highlight his genius.

For Cameron in particular, Herschel was “Teacher and High Priest,” who sent her the first photographs she had ever seen. She demanded that Herschel wash his hair and tousle it, and wild tufts of white hair became an external sign—a visual—for the internal workings of the mind.

As an art historian, I have read Richard Holmes’s Age of Wonder with one eye on the visuals. In this regard, I must take Holmes to task for his treatment of most illustrations in the book as just that—illustrations. As the historian Raphael Samuel reminded us, we can find valuable historical knowledge in images, but we must approach them carefully: looking not for the information that we gain from them, but rather focusing on the information that we bring to them. What do Richard Holmes’s insights mean, then, for the visual art of this period? And what might this add for our understanding of a slightly later cultural moment, which is my own period of research specialization.  The appearance of Sir John Hershel in the book, often viewed as a Victorian figure, raises interesting questions in this regard.

Holmes introduces Herschel in Chapter 9, where he already appears as the product of a different generation. He is the “apprentice” to his father the “sorcere” William Herschel, and he is a foil that allows the author to update the reader on the fates of the elder Herschel, his sister Caroline, and Sir Joseph Banks. Humphry Davy continues to be the main focus of the narrative; Holmes writes a eulogy for the age of wonder in his consideration of Davy’s Consolations in Travel, or, the Last Days of the Philosopher from 1830, even as he re-affirms what he calls “the awe-inspiring” and “visionary nature of the sciences.” The following year, 1831, seems like a decisive break: Charles Darwin departs for his voyage on The Beagle and the “Young Scientists” introduced in chapter 10, Darwin among them, announce a new generation. Holmes notes that “scientist” was recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1840, the same year that John Herschel dismantled his father’s old forty-foot telescope. The year before, Herschel commemorated his father’s achievement by making it the subject of some of his first successes with the incipient medium of photography. Herschel produce a number of negatives, including a blue one using the process known as cyanotype, and as well as “positives” printed from a glass negative, a support that did not become standard practice until the 1850s. The “eye” of the camera lens memorializes the sweeping “eye” of the telescope that enabled the elder Herschel to scan the heavens. In this, it seems to declare a very different set of ambitions, leaving aside the fact that the son quite literally dismantles the work of the father. The younger Herschel gives us the means and the apparatus. How very Victorian! Utilitarianism and professionalization come first. The elder Herschel, in contrast, keeps his eyes and his desire focused on the heavens, not unlike William Blake’s illustration of a star-gazer from 1793.

Yet at least one Victorian view of Herschel would seem to contradict this interpretation. We need look no further than Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic portrait of Herschel to find the inspired genius. While not included in The Age of Wonder, Holmes himself references this photograph at the very end of his tale, where Herschel is recognized as the leading public scientist of the mid-Victorian era. As he describes it “his kindly face, encircled by a sunlike corona of white hair, was famously photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, using a process that he himself had partly invented.” (More on that in a moment). Draped in black, Herschel faces the lens with the seriousness of an Old Testament prophet even as Cameron eschews the usual focus and finish of the portrait photograph. In a footnote, Holmes explains that Herschel appears both “benign” and “eccentric,” a combination that “defined the Victorian ideal of the scientist.” And here I must disagree with Holmes’s assessment: there is nothing particularly “Victorian” about the “eccentricity” of this image: as Ludmilla Jordanova has recently suggested, “romantic idioms” continued to inform depictions of scientists into the twentieth century. Furthermore, the extreme play of light and dark in Cameron’s photograph is meant to address the centrality of Herschel’s theorization of light to the invention of photography.

If we go back to 1830, and think not of Davy’s Consolations but instead of Herschel’s important essay “Light,” we might be able to expand the boundaries of the age of wonder. This monumental article for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana of 1830 (it ran to some 240 pages) suggests that the “Age of Wonder” prompted the cultural imperative of photography.

Acclaimed as the Isaac Newton of his generation, Herschel occupies a special place in the history of photography. His chemical experiments of 1819 led to its invention, and it was Herschel who first described the results of this new process as a “negative” that prints a “positive.” His language still determines the way we envision this process of image making: he was the first to use the term “snap shot,” and he coined the term “photography,” or light writing, to describe the experiments of his friend William Henry Fox Talbot.

In his essay, Herschel proclaims the centrality of sight to experience, declaring that “sight is the most perfect of our sense; the most various and the most accurate in the information it affords us; and the most delightful in its exercise.” This celebration of the visual comes as no surprise when we examine Herschel’s accomplished drawings and watercolors such as this botanical specimen from 1824. As Herschel continues, “Apart from all considerations of utility, the mere perception of light is in itself a source of enjoyment.” This assertion of the delight in nature, then takes a turn for the divine: “When to this we join the exact perception of form and motion, the wondrous richness and variety of colour, and the ubiquity conferred upon us by just impressions of situation and distance, we are lost in amazement and gratitude.” Herschel’s observations here are infused with the language of wonder, as he shifts easily between “exactness” and “impressions.” As scholars such as Geoffrey Batchen and Douglas Nickel have argued, this pairing underpins the invention of photography—the first photographic process, seen here in an example by William Henry Fox Talbot, involved taking the object itself (the exact thing) and allowing the sun to leave its “impression.” Early photographers such as Talbot discussed this process in the same way as “marvelous” “fairy pictures,” the product of “sorcery” “alchemy” “natural philosophy” that was a the same time “natural magic.” According to Douglas Nickel, these are the “Romantic epistemological preconditions” that allowed photography to develop.

Holmes’s Age of Wonder describes not just scientific discovery but also wonder at the unknown, of beauty and terror. If we look a different “impressions” of John Herschel from Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1867 sitting, known not as “the Portrait of Sir John Herschel” but “The Astronomer,” we might see them with new eyes, filtered through the ideas of 1819, 1830, and 1867. The astronomer still scans the heavens.

What Does Science Owe to Wonder?

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Caspar David Friedrich, “Two Men Contemplating the Moon,” ca. 1825-30. Oil on canvas. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Richard Holmes designates the “Romantic Age of Science” as The Age of Wonder, but what of wonder before the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? For over two thousand years before Holmes’ “Romantic generation,” Pagan then Christian thinkers viewed wonder as the starting point of philosophy. Ancient through enlightenment-era natural philosophers underscored wonder as integral to the advancement of knowledge.Aristotle’s Metaphysics articulated the wonder to knowledge paradigm, or admiratio toscientia, as the result of human curiosity. For Aristotle, this natural “desire to know” and philosophize dated back to (and was in fact “owing to”) the earliest philosophers’ state of wonder. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this classical admiratio—scientiaparadigm served as the scientific mantra for, among other philosophers, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Malebranche, and Vico. In The Age of Wonder Holmes elides these more contemporary views of wonder and curiosity as essential for the close attention necessary to advance knowledge and instead ties the classics with the romantics. He cites Plato by way of Coleridge and describes wonder’s effect on the passions and intellect by way of Wordsworth.

Holmes paints the Romantic Age of Science as the second scientific revolution (following Coleridge’s 1819 Philosophical Lectures), one that hearkens “a new vision” or “a new notion of a popular science, a people’s science” as opposed to “the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century … an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge” (xix). Likewise, Holmes suggests a new vision of wonder. This Romantic wonder integrates eighteenth-century concepts of the sublime, as when the book’s subtitle, “How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science” unites the duality of wonder-provoked delight and dread. This wonder unites subjectivity and objectivity to inspire science, or knowledge, by impacting “the heart as well as the mind” (xx). But in fact, this “new” age of wonder reiterates ancient, early modern, modern, and postmodern perceptions of wonder.

The greatest novelty of Holmes’ “age of wonder” belongs to its redirect from religious awe. It is this secular wonder that inspires the “new” notion of popular science he describes as the second scientific revolution. Instead of citing Plato first by way of his student Aristotle and next by way of St. Thomas Aquinas, Holmes separates wonder from Christianity. The thirteenth-century Church Father, Aquinas evoked the opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in order to underscore wonder’s pious usefulness (or utilitas). Effectively Christianizing Plato and Aristotle’s classic admiratio—scientia paradigm, Aquinas’ wonder lead souls to knowledge of God. Thus before Holmes’ second, popular and secular scientific revolution, wonder served both scientific and evangelical functions in human hearts and minds. For example, Catholic Jesuits evoked wonder (admiratio) to inspire knowledge of nature (scientia) as well as knowledge of the Author of all nature (Scientia). Scientific progress could serve “the greater glory of God” (following the Jesuit slogan ad majorem Dei gloriam) and increase human piety. This brand of Christian wonder helped distance impiety from curiosity and greatly benefitted the “first” scientific revolution. For example, Francis Bacon encouraged the contemplation of God’s works to produce knowledge and articulated the Christianized admiratio—scientiaparadigm when he evoked wonder as the “seed of knowledge.”

Although certainly more secular, Holmes’ nineteenth-century “age of wonder” depends on the early modern period of European Empires, when human revelation was allowed to round out that which was divinely revealed and the original warnings against vain, human curiosity by the Church were replaced by the very pious quests for knowledge that spawned that first Western “scientific revolution.” During the fifteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, wonder and knowledge served Christianity. One of the greatest legacies of the Romantic Age which Holmes describes has been the separation of science and religion in both academic and popular discourses. Twenty-first century scientists shy away from extolling the role of wonder (admiratio) as an impetus for knowledge (scientia) that also encourages sacred awe toward the Christian God (Admiratio). Today science tries to resist being labeled superstitious as evolutionists debate creationists and “intelligent design” replaces the language of God as the primary cause of any secondary causes revealed by physics. Throughout all ages, however, wonder (admiratio) has inspired knowledge (scientia): both science to increase piety and science “for its own sake.”